This book absolutely blew my mind. I can't recommend it highly enough; it's funny, haunting, absurd and well-written. Some of the images in these stories, the death of the rat, the floating egg prison, have kept me up these past few nights. ( )

Gombrowicz regularly toys with the elasticity of realism, stretching it as far as it will go before snapping it back. He grounded these twelve tales in reality, yes, but it’s the same freedom-is-slavery reality of post-WWI Eastern Europe that led to the rise of fascism.

Wikipedia in English (1)

“These exuberant stories, so startlingly fresh, so vigorous, and so wildly inventive, are a delight…”—Alastair Reid

“Gombrowicz is one of the most original and gifted writers of the twentieth century: he belongs at the very summit, at the side of his kindred spirits, Kafka and Céline.”—Louis Begley

“One of the greatest novelists of our century.”—Milan Kundera

Stunningly original in both style and content, these stories are hilarious yet have an undercurrent of profound moral disquiet and horror when the respectable turns slowly but inexorably into the outrageous, conveying both the horrors of upper-class life and the deepest anguish of the human condition.